The Methane Beneath Our Feet

[ashling]

Insouciant New Yorkers—here is another pending disaster to shrug off with characteristic brio! There is a huge, ongoing gas leak beneath your very feet. A team of natural gas experts recently commissioned to survey the New York system has found vastly elevated levels of methane in locations all over Manhattan, a clear indication that Con Ed’s 4,320-mile network of pipes, dating back to the 1800s, is corroded, full of holes, and spewing methane into the atmosphere. The main danger here is to planetary, not personal, safety: though it has received relatively little attention, methane, the primary component of natural gas, is second only to carbon dioxide on the list of greenhouse gases that are inducing climate change.

This unhappy news actually comes as little surprise to those who have been following the issue of gas leakages in recent months. Similar revelations actually began to emerge some years ago, when a Boston University professor named Nathan Phillips began trying to figure out how much gas was leaking from pipes in Boston. He fell in with a former local gas company contractor named Bob Ackley, who had been hired by gas companies throughout New England to find leaks, which he discovered were pervasive. As the years passed, he realized his employers considered gas lost from a myriad number of small leaks simply a cost of doing business, and declined to take remedial action unless there was immediate risk of explosion. Dismayed, Ackley struck out on his own as a whistleblower, finding an ally in Phillips. (The intertwined story of Phillips and Ackley is well-told by young journalist Phil McKenna in a recent e-book, Uprising, which also provides useful background.)

Because of the grave threat methane poses to the climate, the dangers of natural gas leakages go well beyond the immediate risk of exploding manhole covers (though recent measurements in Washington, DC indicate that there is enough leaking gas to cause any cautious pedestrian a certain amount of worry). And given the vastness of the problem, the leaks challenge some of the basic assumptions of current US energy policy, which has aggressively endorsed natural gas as a “clean” and climate-friendly alternative to oil and coal.

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The trouble, however, is that the methane in unburned natural gas is twenty to one hundred times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. That makes the math fairly simple: if more than two to three percent of the gas escapes into the atmosphere during transit between its point of extraction in the ground and its final destination—oven, furnace, or powerplant—then natural gas is actually doing more damage to the climate than coal. A 2011 paper by a pair of Cornell scientists estimated that the rate of leakage in the fracking process might be as high as four or five percent, numbers that the natural gas industry scoffed at. But earlier this year a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) study of a gas field in Colorado and Utah found leak rates as high as 9 percent. Those numbers seem almost certainly too high—Nature called them a “small snapshot”—but they also only measure leaking during fracking and pumping. Once natural gas is delivered to a network like New York’s, pipes with holes in them obviously add to the problem.

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April 1, 2013, 1:03 p.m.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/apr/01/gas-leaks-methane-beneath-our-feet/

[Kolesar]

1. Oh, no!! eom

[bobclark86]

2. This is just a symptom...

of this country's lovefest with building lots of infrastructure and then letting it rot.

[byeya]

3. This can't be stopped: Millions of tons of methane are sequestered in the tundra and muskeg. The

perma frost is melting and with it, methane is being released, a lot of methane.
Complicating quantifying the methane release are the prescence of methane eating bacteria; however, if the temperature of the melting muskeg stays below +4C, then the bacteria are not active and most of the methane enters the atmosphere.

If you ride the train between Cochrane, Ontario and Moose Factory, Ont you will travel over 100 miles of muskeg - the amount of methane that may be released is truly enormous.

[Benton D Struckcheon]

4. This is the main problem w/fracking...

...from the planet's POV.
The only saving grace is that methane breaks down much faster than CO2. Of course, you have to actually survive to the other side, after the methane is done decaying. Easier said than done.

[freshwest]

5. My geology classes were years ago, but I've worked underground. We ran into what we called soil gas

and some of them were known to be explosive, methane, etc.

They had no natural odor as a warning, so tests had be made each time we went to check things out underground. It always had to be done to prevent asphixation and setting off explosions with sparks.

Some were in areas which had never been developed, but after putting in manholes for utilities, we were there and the gases were rising through the ground.

In a way, all of the Earth's crust is a 'living' thing, not static, nothing ever is. Fracking is so dangerous, as water goes up and down in the water table, sometimes to levels some could scarce believe.

It seeps up to flood areas where there is no rain or floodwater, from natural forces we cannot control. Anything within the soil can mix with it, which is one of the problems with underground storage tanks polluting water.

My family owned land with oil under it which came on the sides of the river at one edge. It was all natural seepage. The water smelled like sulphur and tasted bad, even before the area was drilled for oil.

I'm hoping someone who is working in this field can give some information on what can be possible be done in the instance described, although I'm thinking natural forces will take their course regardless. And the people doing fracking should know better...